Page 67 of Reaper's Ruin
A tear slipped from beneath her mask, trailing slowly down her cheek. Without thinking, I reached up and brushed it away with my thumb.
That one tear—
It undid her.
With a soft, broken sound, she threw her arms around me, pressing her face to my chest, and she clung to me like I was her only anchor in a storm.
I froze.
No one had touched me like that in eight hundred years.
No one had wanted to.
I wasn’t comfort. I wasn’t warmth.
I was Death.
I was final.
I was feared.
But she pressed deeper into me to me as if I were... safe.
Slowly, like my arms belonged to someone else, I found myself returning her embrace. My hands spread across her back, feeling the warmth of her through the silk of her gown. She was soft and real and so heartbreakingly alive. I squeezed her tighter, enclosing her in my embrace as if I could protect her from every threat, every heartache, every fear she’d ever had.
“I’m scared,” she whispered into the silence between us. “If that’s him... what if he recognizes me? What if he tries to hurt me again? We don’t even know what happens if we die again in these bodies.”
“He won’t recognize you,” I said, the words scraping out of me like gravel. “He doesn’t know you’re alive, and he would never expect you here in this realm.”
I leaned closer, my voice lowering to a promise. “And even if he did... he’d never touch you again. I’d tear him apart before he had the chance.”
And I would.
Gladly.
Piece by piece, if it meant keeping her safe.
She squeezed me tighter. As I held her, something inside me cracked open wide. The detachment I’d built like armor over centuries—the cold, the distance, the void I called survival—it all split like one blow of an axe had shattered it in a single hit.
And what spilled out was... her.
Her laughter. Her stubbornness. Her fire.
I didn’t just care for her as a duty anymore.
I cared forher.
For Soraya.
And in that moment of understanding, of profound acceptance of feelings I never thought I’d have in any life, came a terrible truth just behind it. When she found her door—when she passed through and left this world behind—she would leave me behind as well.
I would return to the Shadowveil.
Alone.
The thought didn’t just ache.
It annihilated.
